Bloodsport: $250K Hearthstone tournament will bring together the world's best players — and maybe you

Developer Blizzard wants the very best digital-card players in the world to face off in one grand tournament later this year.

Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, Blizzard’s online collectible-card game, is getting a $250,000 tournament at the company’s annual Blizzcon event. The developer will invite 16 players to compete for the cash, with first place worth $100,000 … which is money the player will likely reinvest directly into buying more Hearthstone cards. The competition will happen over the two-day Blizzcon event on Nov. 7 and Nov. 8 at the Anaheim Convention Center in California.

Oh, and you have a chance of making it into the competition yourself.

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To fill out the 16-person bracket, Blizzard will invite the top-four players from the Americas, Europe, China, and South Korea/Taiwan. You can make it into top four by winning your regional qualifying tournament, which you can get into in different ways depending on where you’re at. For example, the Americas Qualifier Tournament will take the top players from previous ranked seasons as well as the winners of “select community-run weekly tournaments” and other events. Blizzard has more details on its site.

The World Championship tournament at Blizzcon will take a best-of-five format. Each player can bring three decks based around a different class for each match. When you lose, that deck is done for the series until there is only one hero left standing. Naturally, players must have their own decks.

Blizzard plans to release more info, including the full rules of the tournament, in the near future. For now, it is inviting everyone to go into ranked play for a chance at Hearthstone glory.

Hearhtstone is just one of the latest games to jump into the growing e-sports scene. More developers are looking to competitive gaming to promote their software. Many major publishers hold tournaments to market their games, like Activision’s annual $1 million Call of Duty Championship.

Blizzard isn’t new to e-sports. Its StarCraft strategy games are often the big attractions at major tournaments. Likewise, collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering have a huge number of competitive players.

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Activision (Activision Blizzard) is an American video game developer and publisher headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, but now operating worldwide. It was the first independent developer and distributor of video games for gaming console... read more »